Migrating from WordPress to Drupal?

Sami IMed me this morning, and in part of the conversation mentioned this post he wrote, advocating for the WP developers to migrate from managing their own CMS codebase to using Drupal as the foundation of WordPress. Sounds pretty radical, but when I thought about it, it made sense. Drupal has evolved into a really kick-ass CMS, and we really don’t need a bunch of reinvented wheels rolling around in Web 2.0 space.

Sami also mentioned that he has re-launched his blog, using Drupal once again. He’d dabbled with WordPress, but I don’t think it ever really gelled for him. He’s got his new blog up in Drupal 4.7.0 RC2, and it’s working really nicely.

I would have never even considered moving to Drupal 4.6, but the 4.7 development has been so good, and the current Drupal builds so solid and flexible, that I’m toying with the idea of migrating from WordPress 2.0 to Drupal 4.7. Actually, I’ve already done that migration successfully, in a localhost sandbox on my desktop box. It took me under an hour to get it to first light (including all posts, comments, users, categories/tags), and it’s behaving as well as (or better than) my WordPress blog now. I’ll have to figure out Flickr integration, del.icio.us integration, and several other minor bits that will need twiddling before I’d consider jumping ship, but it’s good to know there are options. I’m using Drupal on enough projects at the Teaching & Learning Centre that it might make sense to switch to the platform I’m living in at work. It would be nice to have a full CMS under the hood of my blog…

The biggest concern I have now is spam management and blocking. Spam Karma 2 is so absolutely stellar at blocking the roaches that I’d consider it a HUGE drawback if Drupal’s spam prevention wasn’t as advanced. I’ll have to investigate there…

Update: Spam.module has been running pretty successfully to protect weblogs.ucalgary.ca, but the module hasn’t been updated to Drupal 4.7, so borks on the new form API. Looks like the WordPress–>Drupal migration path also dutifully brought along all of the flagged (and unpublished) spam comments from my WP blog, but thoughtfully published them under Drupal. Doh. Before running the migration utility, be sure to drop all comments marked as spam…